American baroque: Melville and the literary cartography of the world system

In this dissertation, I argue that Herman Melville's writings--- Moby Dick in particular-constitute an attempt to map an emerging, post-national world system which has become for us, in the late twentieth century, dominant social referent. That is, at a historical moment of intense political nationalism (grounded especially in the fervor over Manifest Destiny) and of a more or less self-conscious literary nationalism (the American Renaissance) in the United States, Melville projects an image of a multinational world system in which the nation-state is no longer the prime motivating force. Moby Dick, among other works, is not part of any "renaissance," I argue, but rather is emblematic of what I call a baroque text; the baroque complexity of Melville's work is directly opposed to the regnant ethos of the American renaissance. Melville produces a "world text" that no longer has the nation-state as its frame of reference. By "literary cartography," I mean to suggest that Melville develops his narrative form with an eye to mapping discrete but inter-related social spaces, eventually moving the mapping project to a global scale. I argue that, by prying Melville's works from their critical situatedness within a still-powerful national narrative, literary critics and scholars can takes up Goethe's call for a "world literature" now, at our present historical moment when the post-national world system provides the immanent plane for thinking about culture and society.